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Do you want to work until you’re 80? A recent Wells Fargo survey of 1,500 Americans between the ages of 20 and 70 reveals that 20 percent of them believe that they will “need to work until at least age 80” to live comfortably into retirement. Additionally, with the depletion of the U.S. Social Security benefits, many people think they’ll have to work past traditional retirement age.

With that said, you may already know that you do not want to work into your golden years, but instead, be able to enjoy them doing whatever you want. Here are some ways to go about ensuring that you get yourself on the right track for retirement:

Make savings a priority. Do you know how much you will need to retire? Forty-seven percent of Baby Boomers are at risk for not having sufficient funds to retire, according to the EBRI Retirement Readiness Rating. In order to know your readiness, you will have to take a look at your earnings level, rate of return on investments, age when your savings began (or will begin) and what age you want to retire. It starts with those calculations

Make catch-up contributions at work. The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 has made it so that individuals over the age of 50 can make additional contributions to their 401(k) and or other individual retirement accounts such as a SIMPLE Plan or a Traditional or Roth IRA. This was supposed to end in 2011, but it has been made permanent to hopefully help restabilize people nearing retirement age.

Diversify your money and take risks if you can. There are several ways to save money for retirement and many levels of risk. You should definitely take advantage of low risk investments such as 401(k), pension plans, money market accounts, and CD’s. There are also high risk investments out there that you can take advantage of, such as getting involved in the stock market or becoming a venture capitalist

Educate yourself on possible retirement reform. There are two proposals out there for retirement reform that could change the way you will look at retirement. It is up to you to decide if you want to take action to reform the current retirement situation in the United States. These two plans for reform, according to ebri.org, are:

A plan that would end the existing tax deductions for 401(k) contributions and replace them with a flat-rate refundable credit that serves as a matching contribution into a retirement savings account.

The so-called “20/20 cap,” included by the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform in their December 2010 report, “The Moment of Truth,” which would limit the sum of employer and worker annual contributions to the lower of $20,000 or 20 percent of income, the so-called “20/20 cap.”

How will the current retirement situation affect the economy later? Not retiring will affect our children and future generations. If we do not retire, we will be competing for jobs that future generations need. So, it is in our best interest to do what we can to retire — not only for ourselves — but for our children and their children.

How are you going to ensure that you can retire when you want to?

Ryan Mack is a partner at TruYuu, an online service that helps people present themselves as more than just a resume to employers. You can connect with Ryan and the TruYuu team on Facebook and Twitter